In 1946, Charles Kelly and friend Frank Beckwith visited Chief Wakara’s burial site in Dry Canyon, near Meadow, Utah. Unfortunately, the grave had been robbed and emptied in 1909. Kelly and Beckwith confirmed this, finding the hole Wakara had once rested in and the stones and poles that once covered it. The monument built in 1973 does not mark Wakara’s exact burial place. Chief Wakara was born in the Utah Valley in the early nineteenth century. According to historian Gustive O. Larson, he was seen as “subtle, vain, and cruel.” According to others, he was “looked upon generally as unpredictable, clever, and savage.” When his father the chief died, he and his siblings entered a bloody succession struggle from which he wrested tribal leadership. Not many details exist of Wakara’s childhood, so historians looking at his life often cite the general history of the Western Utes. Very important to the Utes’ migration patterns and economic activities were horses. Horses made hunting and combat more efficient and allowed the Utes to expand the area (and people) they extracted resources from. To ensure that horses had plentiful grass, the Utes migrated back and forth between California and Utah along the Old Spanish Trail. The Utes raided more horses from California missions and also traded Paiute and Goshute enslaved persons along this trail as well.  In 1847, the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Great Salt Lake valley. This was the beginning of a near-complete disruption of Wakara and the Utes’ way of life. Trade was a central tenet of Wakara and Brigham Young’s initial friendship. Brigham Young’s policy towards Indians was to establish peace through trade and gift-giving. For Wakara, he saw the arrival of the Mormons as the start of a convenient and profitable trading relationship.  While peaceful at first, their relationship soured as resources that Wakara’s Utes had once relied on were exhausted and as Mormons interrupted the highly profitable Indigenous slave trade. In July 1853, the Ivie Incident served as the catalyst for the Walker War, which lasted into the spring of 1854. Interestingly, Wakara spent most of the war outside the territory on the Old Spanish Trail. In 1855, Wakara died of pneumonia, and with his death, Ute territory became gradually incorporated into Utah Territory.

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Before daybreak on June 26, 1866, a party of Timpanogos and Utes—led by Mountain, a Colorado Ute chief—seized around fifty animals, a mix of cattle and horses, from Mapleton, Utah. It was in the middle of Black Hawk’s War, and the Native American party hoped they had achieved a meaningful victory. After driving the animals through a canyon to Little Diamond Creek and feeling they had made a clean getaway, the Native American group took a break in a clear, open field near the convergence of the Little Diamond and Diamond Fork rivers to graze their horses. However, while the horses were grazing, militiamen roused from Springville surprised the indigenous group and cut off their escape route. Knowing they had no other way to escape, the Timpanogos retaliated, and the militiamen took cover in a grove of trees and fired on the Timpanogos. Both sides fired on each other to little avail for a few hours, and Mountain taunted the militiamen, calling out Albert Dimmick specifically as a “coward and a squaw.” Dimmick furiously stood up, out of his cover, and a Native American immediately got a hit on him. Injured, Dimmick died a few hours later. Reinforcements from Spanish Fork came to support the Springville militiamen, further pinning the Timpanogos raiders in the brush. Both the Native Americans and the militiamen tried to spread out and surround the other, but only the settlers succeeded. Pinned between two groups of enemies, the Native Americans stopped fighting—until a leader, most likely Mountain, raised a crest above them and urged them to fight on. At his appearance, the militiamen fired until he slumped in his horse and rode away. As their leader retreated, so did the rest of the Timpanogos and Utes, heading up the steep sides of the canyon and abandoning the captured animals to save their lives. Later, the militiamen found out from Native American contacts that they had killed five or six Utes in the battle. A second militiaman, this one from Spanish Fork, a hotheaded youth of eighteen years, Jonathan Edmiston, had also been killed when he rushed into the middle of the Timpanogos to try to reach the Springville militia’s captain. His fellow soldiers had lost track of him in the brush, and after the raiding party retreated with their wounded and dead, they searched unsuccessfully for his body. The following day, a search party returned to the battleground and found Edmiston’s scalped corpse. This exchange is demonstrative of the scattered battles of the Black Hawk War in Utah.

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Utah Lake is a freshwater body situated in the Provo–Orem area of Utah County. The Lake has been utilized for hundreds of years by a variety of Native tribes, including but not limited to the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshones. A variety of American Indian groups such as the Fremont people lived along the lake’s shores prior to these contemporary tribes, and they all had settlements and benefitted from the lake’s resources and fresh drinking water. Excavation sites organized by archeologist Joel Janetski have yielded a variety of culture-rich native artifacts including arrowheads, beads, shells, cooking utensils, and ceramics like clay pots. The Dominguez and Escalante Expedition of 1776 visited Utah Valley from New Mexico and described the lake and valley in glowing terms. Fur traders also frequented the area in the 1820s and 1830s. In 1847, Euro-American members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints entered Utah Valley, and they eventually utilized Utah Lake as a source of food and water for agriculture. This marked the beginning of settler colonialism and Western encroachment into the region which ultimately led to numerous settler–native conflicts over the land around Utah Lake. As one of the largest freshwater lakes west of the Mississippi River, Utah Lake historically was home to a wide variety of fish, bird, and plant species. The water now has high levels of phosphorus and calcium carbonate sediments, a result of pollution. Utah Lake remains an expansive sight for those living in the Provo–Orem area, and residents and visitors sometimes use the lake for watersports in the summer and ice fishing & skating in the winter.

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Heading South on Interstate 15 towards Orem, UT, it’s hard to miss the massive, industrial-themed Harley-Davidson dealership, situated just across the street from where the colossal Geneva Steel Plant once stood. Much of the exterior material used to build the dealership was salvaged from the rubble of Geneva—one of Utah’s largest employers for decades—in an effort to preserve its memory. Since demolition in 2002, Geneva’s smokestacks no longer dominate the horizon, but its impact on Utah Valley’s fate remains profound.

In 1940, Orem had 2,914 inhabitants, most of whom lived on farms. Geneva Steel would drastically change Orem’s demographics within only a few years. As the United States’ involvement in World War II escalated, the US Federal government began sponsoring new steel mills to accelerate production. Orem was considered the perfect location, because not only was it far enough inland to be safe from foreign invasion, but it was also situated near deposits of coal and other natural resources essential for steel-making.

Columbia Steel constructed the plant and began operation in 1944, bringing thousands to the valley. By the end of the war, Orem’s population had more than doubled; the 1945 US Census reported a population of 8,351. The Great Depression had hit hard in Utah, and the prospect of over 4,000 new jobs at Geneva was a powerful beckoning call. One former Geneva worker, Ken Jolley, who was a young man at the time, recalls expanding his paper route to hundreds of people camped out in trailer homes, as there wasn’t enough permanent housing available to accommodate the dramatic influx of families to the valley.

Geneva’s operation continued long after the war, though it wouldn’t last forever. In 1946, U.S. Steel bought Geneva, and after 40 years, sold it to Utah investors. Many factors worked against Geneva—newer and more cost-effective technology was being used elsewhere, foreign competition was replacing American-made steel consumption, and heightened environmental awareness was lowering public approval of the plant. Eventually, Geneva was sold for the last time. Between 2002-2004, some of the equipment was shipped overseas to other steel mills, and the rest of the factory was demolished.

Today, all that physically remains of what was once an operation stretching over 1,750 acres is a motorcycle dealership using Geneva’s remains as its exterior. However, the impacts of Geneva’s steel production, both negative and positive, are still visible. Decades of air pollution and discharge of heavy metals into Utah Lake have been cause for scrutiny, and whether Geneva was detrimental to Utahns’ health has been a pivotal public debate. However, the thousands of people who migrated to Utah Valley and stayed there have made it what it is today. Orem’s rapid shift from agricultural to residential, as well as much of its economic success, is attributable to the plant—born out of wartime necessity and years of labor by thousands of hard-working individuals.

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Geneva Steel was a wartime steel plant built for World War II that continued operation until 2002. After more than doubling the population of Orem in the 1940s, Geneva remained an important part of Utah Valley’s silhouette for decades. It replaced agriculture with industry and farmland with subdivisions. Most of all, it was appreciated as a much-needed source of employment in a Depression-ravaged country. Over the years, Geneva provided jobs to tens of thousands of people. While steel-working was traditionally a male-dominated industry, many women were employed at the plant as well in its 60 years of operation.

Women were employed at the plant during World War II simply because there was such high demand for workers. Many of them didn’t stay in their positions after the war, and went back to more traditionally accepted women’s roles. However, several women did stay working there and many others would follow in coming years. Patty Ivie is one former worker who is still in close contact with the other female laborers that worked beside her. She was raised doing hard work on a ranch, and it wasn’t hard for her to prove herself as an equal to the men working at the plant. “Once the guys knew that we were going to do the job, they were fine with us.” One of her former coworkers reflected, “We might have done things a little differently, but we got them done.”

While Geneva would always be a male-dominated environment, the women who worked there played a valuable role, both inside and outside the factory. Many of them were single mothers or helping support their families, and were glad to find a job that paid more than traditionally female-dominated positions. One woman reflects on her time as a young, single mother—she would commute to Salt Lake City from Orem to get to her minimum wage job in a restaurant. Once she found the much higher wages available to her if she took a job at Geneva, “I just couldn’t pass it up.”

The reasons for taking jobs at Geneva in the 40s and afterward are varied. Some just wanted the experience of working while abundant openings arose during the war; for others, it was a matter of supporting their families. Just as these women forged strong steel behind Geneva’s walls, Geneva forged these individuals into strong, hard-working women.

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